MS-203 Microsoft 365 Messaging – Planning and Implementing Migrations Part 2

4. PST, IMAP, and Third Party Migrations

So the first one is called a PST Migration. Now. PST stands for personal storage table. Okay? Now a PST file is what Microsoft Outlook will use. If you have Microsoft Outlook installed, it really doesn’t matter what kind of email product you communicate with. With Outlook, if you’re communicating with a top three email server that’s post Office Protocol Three or IMAP Four Internet Message Access Protocol, it really doesn’t matter third party. In fact, in a lot of cases these may be third party, these are probably not. This may not be exchange.

Or it may be that it’s a very old version of Exchange. Maybe you’re running like Exchange 2000 or something and your company is just way behind the curve and you need to migrate everything out to the cloud. But you can’t just directly migrate Exchange 2000 out to the cloud, but you can with a PST migration case. Outlook uses PST files. So you could do that. The first thing you would do here is you got to get your PST files off of the computers where the email lives and then out to the cloud.

So depending upon how many computers you’ve got, you would have to get a copy of these PST files and then you can import the PST files out to the cloud. They actually have a little tool you can download called the PST Import Tool. So you’re going to download that. This is going to let you upload your PST files. Okay. Another option for this though, you can do the network upload. Another option though is you can do drive shipping. And that’s what you’re seeing here in my little slide is you can actually import a bunch of PSD files. So if you were in a large environment and you needed to grab, maybe you were using another third party solution. Or again, maybe you had a really old Exchange environment like Exchange 2000, and you need to get all this out to the cloud.

And so this might be a solution for you. You can actually do what’s called drive shipping, where you actually ship a hard drive out to Microsoft and then they will import the PST files into Exchange Online for you. So this is again going to be suited for a scenario where I want to get a copy of those PST files off of people’s machines and get those out to the cloud and have mailboxes associated with those PST files and move everything into Exchange Online. Okay? Now another solution is called an IMAP migration. Again, IMAP is Internet Message Access Protocol.

IMAP is one of the more common protocols. It is an industry standard protocol that is very common when you are using third party based email servers or if you’re using a web server. As a consultant, I’ve worked with some smaller businesses, and what they’ll do is maybe they’re paying a company like GoDaddy to host their web server and GoDaddy will host you an email server as well. But GoDaddy is not running a change, they’re running like an IMAP server in a lot of cases or maybe you’re using HostGator or somebody like that.

And so from there you could use an IMAP migration in order to do this. An IMAP migration is another way of doing downside about IMAP migrations though is the IMAP migration is not going to migrate your contacts, your calendar or your tasks that you’ve set up through your email. If you’re using Outlook, you might be better served to do a PST migration. But if you need to do a lot of accounts, you had a lot of users, you could do an IMAP migration. Just so you know. There are also alternatives to backing up people’s contacts and calendar items.

So there is ways around that, but the IMAP migration does not do that. The other thing is they do limit you to 500,000 items in a user’s mailbox. So this can be a bit of a pain in the butt if you’ve got a user who has an ungodly amount of email that they’ve collected over who knows how many decades. The other thing is the biggest email you can migrate is 35 meg.

So that’s another limitation on this as well. All right. One other consideration is if you perhaps have set up like a connection limit on your email product. So like, let’s say you were using something like GoDaddy, it may have a hard limit on how many connections you may have to adjust those settings in order for it to perform this migration on a large scale. Another thing is considering rules such as IP addresses that are interacting with your email server, firewall, all of that. But IMAP migration is very suited for a situation where you are using IMAP as your email server, some kind of just a web server running email or something like that.

Third Party now alternatively speaking of third party, we can do what’s called a third party migration. Now with third party you have some popular products out there IBM, Lotus Notes, Novell, group wise, and there are lots of third party tools to help you migrate out to Exchange. So here’s just a few that I’ve listed here. Binary Tree BitTitan quest quadratech SkyKick trans Vault. These are some of the tools that are very much available to you and for the most part it goes really smooth. I worked with a company in Texas a few years ago and they had Nobel group wise, and the two guys I was working with in their It department, they were like group wise experts, but they didn’t really know anything about Exchange.

So you’d be surprised how easy it is with some of these third party tools to get everything out there into Exchange. Could you do an IMAP migration or something like that? Sure, but if you use some of these thirdparty tools, this is going to pull the contacts and the calendars and all that stuff is going to get moved over as well. So sometimes you’re going to be better suited with using these thirdparty tools. Okay? But those are your main alternative ways of performing an exchange migration. All in all, not too difficult to do. Some of these other solutions, microsoft’s little tools are very helpful and of course, so are the thirdparty tools.

5. Performing a Migration

Alright. And then from there, looking over here, down here towards the bottom, you have the hybrid option right here. And then from there you’re going to go to Configure. So we’re going to click on the Configure option here. And then it’s going to pull down the exchange hybrid configuration. Wizard all right, this is what the Hybrid Configuration Wizard looks like, HCW, and I’m going to go ahead and click Next on that. From there it’s going to try to detect the Exchange server that I want to use with my on Prem in order to perform the migration. In my case, instead of waiting on it to do this, I’m just going to select the server and it’s going to be the NYC ex one. Now you’ve also got the, it says Office 365 Exchange Online. It says my Office 365 organizations hosted by and you can choose whichever of these that yours is currently hosted by.

Now in my case, it’s going to be worldwide. But you’ll notice depending upon what country, if your government, you would be choosing one of these other options. Okay. From there. I’m going to click next. And then at that point it’s validating that I’m using the current Windows Identity Administrator examlinepractice. com as my on premise account, which is the admin account I’m logged on to right now. And then I’m going to click to sign into my Exchange Online account. All right. So I’m just going to put my credentials in. At that point it has verified that I’ve put my credentials in. I’m going to click Next and it’s going to now check a few things, make a connection, check the Http and Https status of things, verifying that all of the data is there that it needs in order to perform the migration. All right? And then it succeeded. So I’m going to click Next at this point.

This is where I kind of come to the fork in the road. I got to make a decision. Am I going to do the minimum hybrid or am I going to do the full hybrid? Okay, so if I wanted to do a full hybrid, I would choose this option right here. The other thing is there is the Oct, the organization configuration transfer. Now the Oct is going to transfer your organization policies out to Exchange Online so that your organization policies with Exchange on premise matches, or I should say your organization policies will match on Exchange Online what they matched with your Exchange on Prem. So you can select to go ahead and do that as well if you want or if you want to wait and move your organization policies out there later. Your organizational policies and objects out there later.

You can do that. All right? So I’m going to go ahead and click Next and then at that point it’s going to make me make sure that I own that namespace. Okay? Once that’s done, you add that to DNS, you add a text record to DNS and then you have to have a certificate and it’s going to build the federation for you so that you can do the synchronization. Now if you went back and you go with minimum hybrid, let’s look at minimum hybrid. All right.

So at that point asking if you’re going to do the classic hybrid topology, this is going to bring up the old way of doing it, which was you had to have an internet facing Exchange server, like an edge server that it would communicate with. Or the newer way, which is the way that Microsoft recommends these days, is to use the hybrid agent, okay. Which means it’s just going to install an agent on your machine and it’s going to perform the migration with that agent. So you would click next. All right. And then at that point it says, okay, so you’re going to use an agent. You’ll notice that in my environment, nycx one has already had the agent installed.

But if you wanted to go ahead and just if you didn’t already have it installed, it would ask you if you want to install it. You’d say yes. It’s going to install a little agents software on there. All right. And at that point it says, okay, so your Exchange Online requires you to complete the online process. You got to have the credentials. So I’m going to click Enter, all right. And I’m going to enter in my exchange on premise credentials. Here, let me just put the password in. All right. Got that. We’re going to click Next, it’s downloading the hybrid agent. That takes a moment and then it’s going to run through the verification process. All right. And at that point, once you click Next on that, you can then begin to start the synchronization process.

It’ll make you verify your server one more time, but you can then verify the synchronization process. All right. So now what I want to do, we’ll let that run. Now what I want to do is I want to look at where the cutover migration would be done. Alright. To do a cut over migration. What we would do is we’re going to go here on the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, which you can get to by going to portal Microsoft. com or admin Microsoft. com. Then we’re going to click Show All and we’re going to go down here to the Exchange blade. We’re going to click on that. That’s going to bring us into Exchange Online. All right. From there you’re going to go up to Recipients and then to the right you’ll see migration. Then there’s this little plus sign. You can drop that down.

You’ll notice you have a couple of options. You can migrate to Exchange online or even migrate from Exchange online. So if you wanted to migrate to backed on prem, you could, we’re going to click on migrate to Exchange Online. And this is where we’ve got our options at, right here. Okay, so I’ve got my cut over migration, which is the one I’m here to show you. Of course, you also have the IMAP migration option here. They’ve got a Gmail migration option here. You want to move things like a cut over, but you want to do it in blocks. You got the stage remote migration.

So I encourage you to come in here too, because Microsoft gives nice little descriptions of each one of these. But I’m looking at cut over migration, so I’m just going to select next. Now keep in mind my environment right now is moving through the hybrid migration process. So I can’t continue this because it’s going through that migration. But as you can see here, it says you can enter in your email addresses, enter the email address of one of the users who’s on prem.

So I could enable, I could specify administrator@examlabpractice. com who’s on prem and then the administrator would be examlabacticer and then I would put in the credentials. So at that point it would make a connection with your on prem server and you would have to make sure you got your on prem set up so that you can hit from the internet in an exchange environment.

Obviously you would because you’re able to send, receive email as is, but at that point it would check that and then you could authorize the cut over process, the cut over migration to begin. Okay, so that essentially is the process that would get you into this for the wizard for doing that migration, there’s the IMAP migration as well. By the way. If I wanted to do that, I can go in and do the IMAP migration. This will let you do CSV file batch IMAP migrations. Okay, so those are your different wizards that you’re going to use in order to kick off the migration process. Okay?

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